"Dinsdale!!!"

It will be a cemetery anyway, the way anywhere marked by great violence is. The Devil's Den at Gettysburg and the rolling hills near Oriskany make my flesh crawl whenever I visit. (Oriskany is near where I grew up and I visited there often. One of my earliest memories of there is of hearing screams.) It's like the memories of the terror and rage live in the rocks.

There does need to be a building, and it does need to be business space, but it should be a building, not a memorial.

For the memorial itself, I love those beacons. I would like them to stay. They are real but not solid; elegant but not ornate; elemental but not primitive; unique yet universal. The only drawback is, they're only present at night. But then, during the day, the site will be takin' care of business.

Do you think anyone would go for a little Gothic-style chapel -- stone and stained glass, a dais and some stone benches inside (wood would be "collected" and otherwise defaced), with a fountain and a small garden outside, plunked in a courtyard on the premises? A little place for reflection. The steady stream of people will gradually abate, but there would always be this little unearthly place, deliberately different, for people to settle themselves.

Then the new building wouldn't have to be WTC Jr. It could just be itself.

Regards--
Mary Anne